Tag Archives: cutting wood

Friday 19th February 2016 – THAT’S MORE LIKE IT!

Having used the decongestant stuff last night before going off to bed, I finally managed to have a good night’s sleep last night, even managing to finish off watching the Flash Gordon film that I started to see the previous evening.

I only woke up once too, for the usual reasons, and promptly forgot everything that related to the little journey that I had been on up to then. But I had more luck when I went back to sleep afterwards. I seem to have cricket on the brain right now because I’d started a new job in an office somewhere and this place had a cricket team. There was some important cricket match taking place quite soon and I’d offered my services, but I’d never heard any more. Word on the grapevine however suggested that I’d been chosen to play but I’d never had any confirmation from anyone. Come the day of the match, I appeared at work without my cricketing gear, reckoning that if they were to tell me of my selection at this late hour they could allow me half an hour to go home and pick it up. But nothing happened so I didn’t bother. The match itself was played against a touring XI, either the Indians or the Sri Lankans and was largely a bad-tempered affair. One of the star touring batsmen was dismissed for a duck and the fielding team performed a little choreographed dance in celebration (which I thought was in extremely poor taste) and even the square leg umpire joined in the celebration, which is unheard-of. Obviously, the batsman was quite upset by this and made some kind of remark or gesture, which was met with a barrage of abuse from the fielding side and the umpire. All of this made me think that I was glad that it was a match in which I wasn’t taking part.

I could have gone on from here too but a rather dramatic noise from the kitchen broke the spell. What was actually happening was that Liz was busily destroying a cardboard box to use as kindling to light the stove. From upstairs, it sounded like an earthquake.

At least I managed an early breakfast out of it and then, in accordance with my usual custom, did absolutely … errr … badger-all for the rest of the day. I was the only one who did nothing however. Terry was out for a good few hours cutting another pile of wood and Liz had another student come round for a lesson. We also had a social visit too.

For lunch, I finished off the leftovers from yesterday’s pizza (which, like most spicy or garnished foods, tastes even better the following day) and for tea it was chips, burger and baked beans – with real Sarson’s malt vinegar.

In fact, the nurse asked me how I was doing and asked if I was eating well. I replied, quite honestly, that I was in the best restaurant in the world here and once I’ve recovered and ready to go home, I’m going to find something else wrong with me.

Now, having watched the England cricket team, and especially Chris Topley, brilliantly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory against the South Africans, I’m off to have yet another early night. I can’t last the hectic pace these days, can I?

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Wednesday 20th January 2016 – I HAD YET ANOTHER BAD NIGHT …

… last night. I was still awake at 01:00 and nowhere near going to sleep, although I must have done at some point because at 02:45 I was awake again and off down the corridor.

Between falling asleep the first time and going off down the corridor, nothing much happened. Or, at least, if it did, I know nothing about it. But between then and the next time that I woke up – round about 06:30, an enormous amount had been going on – to such an extent that I dictated almost 7 minutes of notes.

And this, dear reader, is what you have to sit through for the next few minutes or so.

We started off driving through a town somewhere – turning right at a set of traffic lights just before the centre. Once we’d turned, we noticed a big sports field on the left where there was a huge bowling competition taking place. All around the town and on the bus (because I was upstairs in a double-decker) there were people who all had little white lions (like the old Egg Marketing Board stamps) stamped on their body. The jacks had been stamped with the white lions and the marks on the bodies were where the people had been holding the jacks against themselves. A little farther on was a left turning where we swung around into the town centre and where were all of the shops. Just along this street was a branch of Woolworth’s (shows you just how old this all was) where we were heading but today it happened to be closed. Nevertheless, I found my way in and went for a wander around, particularly on the upper floors, having for some reason been separated from the others with whom I’d been travelling. But I was captured, and held as a kind of prisoner (during this part, I was actually a spectator, watching myself being restrained and tied up). The person who had imprisoned me had a heavy pole, something like a foot-length piece of sawn-off scaffolding tube and his intention was to use it to beat my head into a pulp. But thinking quickly, I said “hang on – isn’t that someone pulling up outside the building?”. He wandered over to the window to see and as he passed, even though I was still tied up, I managed to grab hold of the metal pole, wrestle it from his grasp with one quick movement and slosh him on the back of the head with it. I could then make good my escape.
We then descended into things that resembled even more like James Bond activities and I was partnered in these activities by a young girl who has featured a couple of times on my voyages. She was wearing a heavy dark blue hooded cloak something similar to Little Red Riding Hood’s cloak but with a much more pointed hood and which put her face well into the shadows, but I knew that it was she. I’d been searching through this house and ended up being accosted, and was being interrogated. I had to think quickly of a way to escape from this predicament. There was a an old vintage car in this room so I was thinking that if I could bolt some bolts though the holes in the sills so that the threads were protruding, and coat the exposed threads with a deadly poison, I could somehow contrive to have these people back up against the car, bang their legs on the exposed threads which would then inject the deadly poison into their bloodstream and that would be curtains for them (how I was going to do all of this whilst under constant surveillance didn’t appear to worry me, apparently). But while I was trying to work out all of this at the same time as answering all of these questions, I looked up into a dark corner of the room on top of the car but just underneath the ceiling, and there was the pointy blue hood and the dark shadowy face. I said out loud to the person interrogating me that it’s a shame that the girl (mentioning her name) wasn’t here with me because she would soon make short work of him – once he had backed up against the car, she would give him a real headache. His response was “don’t be silly – of course she isn’t here”. Of course, my little speech was to give the girl a clue as to what to do. It goes without saying that sooner or later, the guy in charge was leaning against the car, his elbow resting on the car bonnet while he was talking, and of course the inevitable happened. This girl wielded the scaffolding pipe (we still had that) to great effect. It was the matter of seconds to overwhelm the others and the girl and I made good our getaway.
I was back home after that and I had emptied out my van. There were all kinds of papers that needed to be sorted out, which I was doing. I’d left in the van a few books on submarines to read while I was on my travels but when I was going through all of these papers there was yet more stuff on submarines that should have stayed behind. One thing that I found was a rare postage stamp, a fidelity card for something, and a copy of a message – a parody of the “England expects” message issued by Karl Dönitz to his submariners on the eve of the surrender in 1945. I tucked this message into the plastic cover on the inside of my dairy thinking that I’d deal with this later. But with this rare postage stamp and fidelity card, I took them round to the girl who had accompanied me on my James Bond adventures. I knocked on the door and her mother (but it wasn’t her mother) answered the door, so I explained why I had called and asked if daughter was in. Daughter came bounding down the stairs with a huge smile on her face to collect these items. In exchange, her mother and granny (who was also there) gave me the post that they had been collecting for me in my absence and also a pile of used stamps. I was looking for Indian stamps as Bill had been looking for 50 rupees-worth to send off an application for something or other – and it didn’t matter if the stamps were used and franked or not.

From here I went down to breakfast and my injection, and afterwards carried on with some work on the laptop. But Terry said after awhile that “none of this is getting the work done” and proposed to go out and cut the rest of the wood that we hadn’t finished yesterday.

Working yesterday had worn me out but I can’t be an ungrateful guest, so I went out to help. I was there for another hour and a half or so and then we came in for coffee, having picked up some bread from the boulanger who came round today.

After coffee, Terry went out to carry on, but I was done for and that was my lot. I carried on with what I had been doing beforehand and then prepared everything for lunch.

Terry went out after lunch to price up a job and I stayed behind – I’m not up to all of this yet. I had a doze and then played around with my 3D program, had a doze and then did a pile more of my animation course. I’ve now finished week three (minus the practical work) and I’ve now started week four. I go into hospital next Wednesday and I want it finished by then.

Liz made a quiche for tea and I had an individual one, made with a kind of cheesy garlic and herb paste, together with baked potato and a kind of coleslaw salad. Really beautiful it was too. I do have to say that the food here is thoroughly excellent and I shall be very sorry to leave.

Now I’m relaxing, and then I’m off for an early night. I need one after yesterday’s and today’s efforts and the bad night that I had had last night.

And no 3D characters and no family members and no taxis in my voyage last night? I wonder where they all went.

And I wonder who will turn up tonight to accompany me on my travels.

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Tuesday 19th January 2016 – TERRY’S HAD ME …

… hard at it today.

Sitting there finishing off our post-prandial coffee, when he announced “let’s go and cut some wood!”.

Terry’s wood is free. The commune of Sauret-Besserve has a huge communal forest and part of the privileges of the commune is that you can have a couple of trees. Each year, you lodge your demand with the mayor and he sends round a forester to inspect the forest. Trees that are condemned are then allocated amongst the villagers who have lodged demands, but they have to cut them down themselves.

Terry works with the neighbour across the road to cut down their wood together, and it’s all stacked in 2-metre lengths in a big pile. So we coupled up Terry’s big trailer to the Jeep and went to fetch a trailer-load.

We then had to unload it, cut it into 40cm lengths, then split it into manageable chunks and stack it in the barn. All in the pouring rain, because it really was wet. I managed an hour or an hour and a half and then I had to come in and sit down. I’m definitely not up to it yet, although it is an improvement from when I last tried to do some work. It really was heavy work lifting all of that wood into the trailer.

Apart from that though, I didn’t do a great deal. I didn’t even do anything on my animation course. I’d had a bad night, en early start and so I was pretty much out of it for quite a while in the morning.

Last night, I didn’t end up going to sleep until late – my guilty conscience must be catching me up. And when I finally did go to sleep, it was a fitful night of restlessness and awakening, punctuated by some more impressive nocturnal rambles.

We started off by featuring once more some of my 3D characters. There was some kind of sports tournament involving them and there are loads and loads of people and other 3D characters watching from the sidelines and most people are dressed in fancy dress. I remember a kind of medieval knight in chain mail and someone else wrapped in what looked like an Argentinian flag.
From here, we moved on to a pub somewhere. It was one of these 1950s type of housing estate pubs, the Greenall Whitley type that you used to see everywhere. At this pub, something had happened and the landlady had to be evicted from the premises. However she’d been to the court and obtained a stay of execution of the eviction. One day, though, she had to leave the pub for some reason or other, and on returning, she found that the brewery had taken possession and locked her out. We had all gathered outside the pub to show our support for the landlady and to try somehow to get her back into her property. This involved my brother, my youngest sister’s husband (them again?) a set of steps and a short ladder. We had to use the steps and the ladder to climb up over the verandah and up into a window on the first floor. It was all down to me of course because they certainly weren’t interested in climbing up, and they were making life extremely difficult for me because they didn’t have the ladder in the right place for me, not being able to find the steps, not putting the steps in the right place. They couldn’t do anything correctly. Anyway,to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … we couldn’t find a way in there and so had to try another route, up and over the porch over the front door and in through the window above. It wasn’t long before the owners of the pub, the brewery, the clients and the new temporary landlord realised what was going on and they all came surging out. This led to a pile of gratuitous insults being hurled and it all became quite offensive and unnecessary. One person in particular was particularly uncooperative and unpleasant and wanted to know who was in charge of our party. I replied that I supposed that I was. He mentioned something about music so I pointed him in the direction of the manager of the rock group in which I played. He asked the manager if our group could quickly learn 12 songs to play for his audience. In principle, that wouldn’t be too much of a problem but there was a big discussion, if not argument, about how safe would the young girl who sang with us be, walking up to these premises on her own by the main road at night with all of the traffic around, would she be able to cross over the street into the pub?
I ended up back on the taxis again after that. We were on a weekend, a Saturday night in fact. Things were starting to wind down a little and another taxi driver came to see me, rather annoyed, wanting to know what one of his regular passengers had been doing in one of my taxis. It was a really good fare to Wigan too. I had a look in our day book and it seemed that it was a fare from a pub called the Farmer’s Arms (there’s one of those at Ravensmoor, near Nantwich). he was annoyed, saying that none of his regular passengers would ever willingly get into a taxi driven by anyone else, however our records showed that it was a call from one of the employees of the pub that had summoned our taxi and we knew no more about it than that. The driver concerned happened to be on duty and we asked him about it, and he confirmed exactly what I had said, without being prompted. The fare had actually come to £37:00, and that was in early-1980s prices too, so I could understand him being quite upset about losing the fare. We smoothed this over anyway and eventually ended up talking about Air Products at Elton and British Salt at Cledford (two places where my father had worked in the past). It seemed that the landlord of this pub had had something to do with Air Products and that was the connection between me and the Farmer’s Arms. It seemed that this taxi driver had given my telephone operator a hard time over this affair and just at this moment she was there in the street (which bore a passing resemblance to Vine Tree Avenue) so he asked me to go over and present his compliments to her and explain that the matter had been resolved. Most unlike taxi-driving in Crewe, this was.
As an aside, I’d said to my taxi driver that I’d see him back here at work tomorrow morning, but he replied that I wouldn’t – he was going to have a day off. So I had had a look at the job sheets for next morning and saw that we had jobs booked in from 06:00 on that morning, meaning that I would be finishing here at 04:00 as we had jobs booked right up until then, and then back out at 06:00 (not that this kind of thing had ever bothered me too much when I really was doing it back then) but I said nothing, and put on a cheerful face about it.
But on the subject of taxis and British Salt, where’s our Leyland Princess? As a matter of fact, I did have one of those at one time. It was near Christmas 1988 and Nerina and I just happened to be at a car auction and a beautiful 1800 Princess, W reg, went through, with a long MoT and 5 months tax for just £270. But it had the wrong driveshaft in it and it kept stripping the hubs (as I was to find out later). In the end, I went down to the scrapyard and dismantled the entire front end of another one and spent a whole day swapping it over. And then it ran fine until the clutch went. But I digress. But last night, the car was in the hands of one of the mechanics at British Salt (and not George either) having some work done on it, and it was now Friday and we still hadn’t had the car back. I went over to the garage there to talk to the guy to see what had happened to it (strangely enough, the garage was almost a reverse image of how it really used to be). I met up with the guy who told me that it was having to have the servo changed and it will be ready some time next week. But it was now Friday and we were always really busy over the weekend and I couldn’t afford to have the car not on the road. I told him that we really needed it – we were rushed off our feet. I couldn’t afford to wait until Monday for it. So this ended up in some kind of dispute.
But from here, another person entered into the story. A Greek girl called Maria with whom I worked when I was in Brussels. Right now, I can’t remember how or why she fitted in to some part of these adventures last night, but she was certainly there.

3D models, taxis and taxi drivers, British Salt, Maria, my brother and brother in law? We’ll be having Godzilla putting in an appearance next.

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Wednesday 13th January 2016 – I’VE BEEN WORKING …

… today. And outside too! Snow is forecast from Friday until next Wednesday and the woodpile is starting to look a little low. Terry had salvaged some beams from a previous construction project and so he set out to cut them up. He handed me a small hand-axe and I went to attack another pile of waste wood in order to reduce it to kindling.

We were out there for an hour or an hour and a half or so and ended up with quite a respectable pile that will keep us going for a while. But I’m clearly not fit – even chopping up a pile of kindling was wearing me out.

But that wasn’t the most exciting part of the day. That was reserved for something of a non-event. There I was, up and about and all ready, a good few minutes before 08:00, and waiting for my nurse to come and give me my injection. And waiting. And waiting. By the time that 11:30 came around, I realised that he wasn’t going to come at all and I could have had a decent lie-in.

When he came round in the evening, he was surprised to learn that he had forgotten. he had had quite a few blood samples to take (and they always have to have priority – no-one likes to hang around for too long waiting for breakfast) and then was carried away with the rest of his work. I’m not complaining though – as you know, I’m fed up of being used as a dartboard and if I can have half a day off, then so much better for me.

After lunch, Terry went out on an errand to visit someone out near Menat and I stayed here (just for a change). I didn’t do too much in the afternoon except work on my animation course. I wasn’t up to much and ended up going for an early night.

But then again I’d been on yet another major mega-ramble during the night and having the dictaphone right by my bed, I had recorded almost everything that had happened. And this news is bound to depress you because there was tons of stuff, a great deal of which totally surprised me when I came to type it out for I didn’t remember even half of it. It does make me wonder what I’ve been missing out of my nocturnal rambles over the last few years when I’ve not had the dictaphone to hand.

And so – here we go. You have been warned.

Terry and I were watching Convoy but, as well as I know this film, it was a Convoy with loads of scenes right at the beginning that I had never ever seen before. We were discussing the relative merits of the “cab-over” and the bonneted cab configuration of modern lorries. I said that Darren, my niece’s husband, hated cab-overs (which is hardly a surprise when you consider the machinations that a mechanic has to go through in order to reach the engine). We went out in an American lorry (and I’ve no idea what cab configuration it was) and we came upon a peloton of American cyclists who were all cycling nude. This led us onto a scene where there were two young girls, one of whom had had a text from her boyfriend referring to something about her going to have a really good seeing-to and the second making a joke about it, and then telling her mum that she had to go because she was “needed elsewhere” with all kinds of other things to do.

A bit later on, we had yet another family reunion as my brother once more entered into the fray. And as usual we were arguing. This time about a car workshop manual. And this took place as we were walking down the street in Welsh Row, Nantwich. I ended up tearing it into shreds, throwing it into the street and telling him to … errr … go away. And as I turned to storm off down the street I heard him call out “Goodnight” to my eldest sister, mentioning her name. And I didn’t know if she was really there or not, or whether he was merely saying that to make me turn round. Anyway, I didn’t turn round and carried on walking down the hill. It was pub-closing time when I reached the town centre. Everyone was milling around at the night clubs and I walked through the Crown Hotel (which wasn’t the Crown Hotel, but since when has that ever had anything to do with where I go and what I do at night?) where all of the people were leaving and the staff was busy clearing up the place. I walked out of the other door into the corner of Pillory Street and Hospital Street (which is of course nowhere near the door of the Crown Hotel) right opposite the old Boots shop to confront a big silver Mercedes saloon coming the wrong way up the one-way street, to the hoots and derisions of all of the pedestrians on the pavement. We ended up watching one of these tests about “what do you do if you have all of these chemicals and fireproof blankets and a fire breaks out?” The person running the test told us how to make a cocktail of these ingredients (which I shall be trying just as soon as I go home, believe me) and what effect it would have, but it’s also a by-product for treating eczema. And if you are treating someone with eczema who has been possessed by the devil, you don’t need to earth them to make the devil leave when you paste this tomato-like paste on their eczema.
Now here’s a thing. Of all of the family who have been recently making an appearance, you will be doubtless wondering when my niece in Canada will be putting in an appearance. Well, wait no longer because tonight, she finally walks onto the stage. We set out with me back home, packing, making ready to go to Canada, but for some reason, when I was all ready to go, I ended up not going. However, I went off to my office with all of my suitcases. My colleagues were curious about this and kept asking me where I was off to and so I explained about my trip to Canada. I then had to go to speak to someone, and I learnt that they were in the swimming baths – and I’d just come from there! All my swimming clothes were wet but nevertheless I had to go back there, change into them, and then go back into the pool. And the person for whom I was looking was no longer there. I went back to the dressing room and changed, being fed up, cold and wet, and went back to the room where my suitcases were. We then had a lengthy discussion that instead of me going to Canada, I was going off the Germany for a few days. But I had to book a bus – and you REALLY DID have to book it too, you couldn’t just turn up and get on – and I hadn’t done that, with just an hour left before the bus departed. Anyway I set off for Germany but it wasn’t Germany to where I was going but somewhere else and here I met up with my niece and her youngest daughter. We were having a really good chat but the surrounding were quite uncomfortable so she suggested that we all go back home again. For my part, I wasn’t too concerned and felt that it would be okay if I were to find a put-u-up bed or something. We each had a hot cup of syrup – mine was mint but I can’t remember what the others had. However my niece decided that she wanted hers cold so I had to put some seawater in it to cool it down. Daughter and I set off to find the seawater (the idea that the syrupy drink would be cold long before we returned never entered our heads) but outside the building was a pile of puppies and a kitten. Daughter saw them and fell in love with them of course. Someone in the neighbourhood shouted a puppy’s name and all of the puppies and the kitten scampered off. We walked off up the street and here we met someone with a pet raccoon. Daughter fell in love with that too and so we ended up having a good chat to this person. We eventually ended up where this water was, and it bore more than just a passing resemblance to the back of the city centre of Chester with the little streets that went down to the by-pass (which was the water line for us). The tide was in and the water had come up to the steps so in principle you could just wade in a grab some. However, the water didn’t look very clean and the faster-flowing water closer to the centre of the river would be much cleaner and so that was the place to go. This involved climbing up a stairway and along a raised brick and stone walkway to a tower right at the end, all of which was fenced in by a tubular metal hand-rail. But to reach there, with the tide being so far in, you ended up to your neck in water. I told daughter to make sure that she stayed on the steps on the shore and I set off , wading out to these other steps to take me up onto the walkway. However, the stairway was fenced off so I had to retrace my steps and swim right around to find a way up (how I was going to bring this water back without spilling it was yet another thought that hadn’t occurred to me). When I finally clambered up onto the walkway, someone was around there shouting to everyone to keep away as there was a raw sewage outlet just offshore a little further out. Daughter then put in an appearance – she hadn’t stayed where I had told her to stay. And so we had to think again about where we could obtain some more seawater.
The three of us (me, niece and daughter) ended up driving through Stoke on Trent with another guy in the car. I was explaining to him just how derelict The Potteries was, showing him many of the derelict sites around the city. We were heading from Hanley out towards Ash Bank and came to a big roundabout (bearing more than a passing resemblance to the roundabout on the outer ring road of Brussels right by the Woluwe Shopping Centre) but the roads over it, particularly the slip-road heading to the south, was completely overgrown with weeds. We had quite a laugh about this as I did a couple of laps of the roundabout, but despite the roundabout being very large, I ended up with two wheels on the kerb at one point. We took the exit that led off to Longton (which bears no resemblance whatever to the “real” Longton) and found the town to be crowded, loads of people around. We arrived at some temporary traffic lights controlling traffic at some road works. One of the workers had a pneumatic road-breaker digging up the road, but when the lights changed to green, he carried on digging so no-one could move. The lights changed back to red, and then to green, and he was still there digging. I rolled the car forward until it was right up against his spine but he still carried on. In the end, I left the car and switched off his machine so that he could hear me and I could ask him why he wasn’t watching what was going on and watching the traffic lights and so on.

It’s hardly surprising that I was totally worn out after all of that. How long can I keep this up? 2023 words tonight and it’s enough to give me another dose of writer’s cramp.

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Wednesday 18th November 2015 – I DIDN’T …

… start to take the tiles out of Caliburn today, like I said that I would yesterday.

In fact, we had a beautiful blue sky for most of the day and that can only mean one thing … woodcutting!

So there I was after lunch, with the chop-saw and the excess solar energy and I had another good go at the woodpile. In fact, one of the woodpiles is done now as much as I can with the chop-saw, and I’ve started to attack the second woodpile – the pile with the old chevrons from the barn roof.

Some of the chevrons are quite good so I won’t be cutting them up. I’ll be using them in construction projects whenever I’ll feel up to doing something like that, but others are pretty mangy and so they have gone to the great woodshed in the sky. And there will be more to follow them on the next fine day.

Three large wheelbarrow-loads found their way into the woodshed today and that’s now looking quite healthy in there – about 2/3rds full. And when I finish the remainder, and then rescue my chainsaw and cut down the lengths that are too big for the chop-saw it’ll be bursting at the seams.

While I was doing all of this,I had visitors. The farmer who rents the field behind me came along with his wife, son and herd of cows. He’s pleased with the weather because he can keep his cows out in the fields and there was enough growth in the field behind me for at least 10 days of grazing. In fact, we all had quite a chat.

But as expected, I was totally exhausted after all of that woodcutting and I had to have a 10-minute doze before I could tackle the stairs up to here. When I finally made it up here, I put on a film to watch but crashed out through most of it. The St. Trinians – The Belles Of St. Trinians [DVD] it was, and here’s a thing. I thought that I recognised one of the voices when the schoolgirls were talking, and it turns out that a schoolgirl by the name of Jackie is played by none other than Diana Day, who is Susan, Jimmy’s sister in The Clitheroe Kid

This morning I had a good session on my course and found, to my surprise, that I’ve finished this week’s lectures already. We finished with a quiz that was actually a forensic examination of a skeleton discovered under a barracks floor and to my total astonishment I had 100%, which completely surprised me

So now that that’s all done, it gives me an opportunity to do the rock music programmes for Radio Anglais, and that should keep me out of mischief for the next few days.

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Thursday 12th November 2015 – WE HAD AN UNEXPECTED …

… lie-in this morning. Due entirely to the fact that the battery in the mobile phone went flat during the night so the alarm didn’t go off.

Nothing at all to do with my nocturnal ramblings during the night. I was walking up the hill from the traffic lights at Burland crossroads up towards Hurleston Reservoir and Car Transplants. There wasn’t a road up there – just a dirt track between a couple of fields. And in the fields were a couple of guys working away and, quite interestingly, a couple of Alsatian dogs were conveying messages between the men and whoever it was who was in charge of them. At the top of the hill was a car – the type of early 50s American car with a V8 flathead engine and which was leaking oil out of the sump. I suggested that they went up to Car Transplants to see what they could find there, but they needed to sort themselves out because they were insisting that it was a ’57 model but of course it wasn’t. 1952 at the outside, I reckoned, but they insisted.

After breakfast I carried on with my studies but we had a change of plans round about 12:00. Bright sunshine streaming outside and the batteries fully-charged so I grabbed the chopsaw, the workbench, the extension cable, the plastic sheet and the wheelbarrow, and I attacked the woodpile again.

I can’t remember whether it was 5 or 6 huge barrow-loads that I cut but it was also two boxes full of kindling. You can now see the difference that I’ve made, and the woodshed is now looking like it ought to look. There was half a bin-bag full of sawdust too.

One thing that I did do was to cut up four or five window frames. A few years ago I came across a skip loaded up with old house windows and, with permission, I rescued them (you can’t live around here without a van – I don’t care what anyone says). The wood wasn’t up to much but I salvaged quite a few window panes that I’ll be using to make cloches and repairing windows around the barn.

But the wood – all oak – makes good firewood. A couple of 12-inch lengths on that on the fire will keep the place going through the night. I don’t understand the mentality of people who throw away decent firewood like this.

After that, I came up for my lunch (it was now about 17:30 by the time I’d tidied away everything) and instead, I just crashed out on the sofa for a good hour.

But this chopsaw is proving its worth, especially when I have the surplus electricity to power it. We had 34 amps of surplus solar energy again even with running the chopsaw, which at times brought the voltage down to 11.6 volts. But that’s not important because of the intermittent use of the chopsaw. Generating a (very) theoretical solar maximum of 70 amp-hours, it soon builds the batteries back up. It would of course be a totally different matter if the use of the chopsaw was persistent or continuous.

So I’m off to bed. I have a test tomorrow on my course so I need to be at my best. And then we’ll see what the weather is doing.

-2

Monday 2nd November 2015 – WOW!

Yes indeed. We’re having one of the windiest days that we’ve ever had since I began keeping records. We’ve had gusts of up to 47kph and all of the wind turbines here have been going round like the clappers. We’ve not quite had record wind energy figures, but we aren’t far off it and it’s still cracking up (although I’ve taken the records now so the rest will be added to tomorrow’s figures).

As for today, I was up fairly early, and after breakfast I spent some time on the computer. This course on Hadrian’s Wall that I’ve started to study is rather different. It’s done on line with embedded videos and that’s going to cause a load of problems with my sad internet speed. But it looks quite interesting.

Not many people realise this but there are two wall systems in the UK. Hadrian’s Wall between Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Carlisle, and the Antonine Wall between the Firth of Clyde and the Firth of Forth. Some people think that both walls were built by the same Emperor but the Northern one is definitely by the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius. Hadrian had only got one wall.

I didn’t have lunch today – I went out and started work instead and was rather carried away. We had beautiful sunny weather and with the wind we had a nice pile of electrical energy and with no dump load at the moment, I adopted plan B and fetched the chop saw.

I set up a workbench outside and started to attack the huge stack of wood that’s been building up outside over the past few years. Old branches and tree trunks that I’ve pulled up and cut down in the past as well as the old chevrons from when I replaced the roofs here.

The stack of wood doesn’t look much smaller but I’ve cut up enough to make a huge pile of wood. I’ve filled up the woodshed with some of it, and I’ve filled an IKEA bag to bring up here ready for whenever winter might arrive. But the chop saw idea worked in spades. With plenty of electricity to play with, it was 10 times quicker and 10 times less tiring than doing it with the hand saw. But there are some bits that won’t fit under the chop saw and so I’ll need the chainsaw for that, when Terry has finished with it.

But it does go to show. I once had a friend with whom I shared all of my hopes and aspirations about this place and my aims for the electrical system. I regarded him as being my best ever friend but then I found out that he was going onto a Land Rover forum on the internet and mocking my ideas, he and his friends having a really good laugh about it and a few offensive comments being thrown in for good measure. Of course, no friendship can withstand that, but it’s this kind of thing that is showing that I’m having the last laugh.

When I finished, I came up here to watch a film (I’m reverting to my old habits at long last) but crashed out instead. Once I had woken up, I cooked the pizza that I had forgotten to eat.

Tomorrow if the weather is good I’ll be carrying on with the woodpile. And if not, there are plenty of other things to be getting on with. High time I cracked on.

0

Monday 14th April 2014 – AFTER ALL OF THE EXCITEMENT …

… after the weekend, it’s back to the daily grind today.

We had the usual few hours on the website this morning and then I went outside. First job was to clean out the solar shower – and it needed it too. Something of a mess of algae growing in there over the last 9 nonths;

I found most of the stuff to connet up the heat exchanger to it too, but there are still a couple of vital parts missing so I need to go to Brico Depot for those.

As I couldn’t connect up the heat exchanger I decided to deal with another issue that I’ve been putting off – the outside shower cabinet. I started to sift through the old beams left over from when we did the roofs here, but the more I checked the beams the worse they were and I’ve ended up with a huge mound of extra firewood instead.

Not that that worries me, because they were always going to be for firewood and if I could reuse any (like I did on the woodshed) that would be a bonus.

So by 18:00 I gave up the idea of finding enough recycled wood, and went to water the garden. It was a glorious day today and everything needed it.

And then I found some new wood – a couple of chevrons and demi-chevrons, and started to cut those but I didn’t get very far before knocking off time.

full moon les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd tonight we have a glorious, gorgeous full moon. Just like the one that we had on the banks of the St Lawrence near Godbout in May 2012.

Mind you, the setting here chez moi is nothing like as spectacular.

I really ought to think about moving on, oughtn’t I?

-4

Wednesday 27th November 2013 – I’VE FINISHED …

… building the framework for the woodshed, and the two sides are assembled. It doesn’t half look serious too, as indeed it should – 2 metres high and 1.5 metres deep and it will be 4 metres wide when it’s properly assembled.

Next stage of course is to dig the holes in order to plant the legs of the sides, but I’m not sure that I’ll be doing that tomorrow. Right now, it’s -7°C outside and dropping rapidly, and with one of the clearest starry skies that I have seen for a while, there’s no limit as to how low it might go.

Mind you, we had a gorgeous day today as well. Hardly a cloud in the sky all day and 78 amp-hours in the electric water-heater. It was quite enjoyable working outside.

And I’ll tell you something else. If you remember back to September, I bought a Ryobi Plus One Impact bit driver, and I used it today. It gets through the batteries but it drove the 6×60 screws right into the wood without very much effort at all, without any pilot holes – and we are talking real wood too, not this resinous pine stuff. I was well-impressed with that.

I finished that about 15 minutes before it went dark so I had a wood-cutting session – some of the rotten beams that I’d pulled out. And then I had to go to Marianne’s – she’s upgraded her computer but half of the programs that she has wouldn’t install. Hardly surprising, as some were for W98, but others just needed a little tweak. And back home, I had Rosemary on the phone for 15 minutes.

Now I have the fire banked up and I’m going nowhere.

-5

Wednesday 20th November 2013 – THE SNOW DIDN’T LAST LONG …

… this morning. It was mostly all gone by 10:00 and we were back in the dreary marshland again. It’s like to good old days, with mud up to my ears.

This morning I carried on in the barn and finally reached the far wall. That’s an achievement – there’s stuff there that I haven’t seen for probably 15 years, and when I get around to it, there will be a lot of stuff going down to the dechetterie.

After lunch, it was the turn of Rosemary to ring up for a chat. She has a courtesy car at the moment as hers is in at the garage, and she couldn’t work out how to put it into reverse. Having sorted that out, we had a good 20 minute natter on the phone.

A then had a couple of hours in the lean-to. I found a shelf unit when I was tidying in the barn, and it will just go nicely in the lean-to by the door, but I need to make some space of course. The best way to do that is to chop a pile of wood and while that didn’t seem to make any room at all in the lean-to, it certainly filled up the woodshed. I suppose that i’ll have to keep on chopping. But if I can get the shelf unit into there I can put all of the gardening stuff there so it’s out of the way where it should be.

This evening I made another aubergine and kidney been casserole without the kidney beans because i forgot them, and it’s snowing again outside. And the snow looks much more determined than it did yesterday evening, that’s for sure.

-9

Wednesday 2nd January 2013 – IT WAS BACK …

… to work today.

First time since I’m not sure when.

However, first task was to start on the web page for my visit to Lévis (that’s pronounced “Layvee”, not “Levi’s”) which is across the St Lawrence from the city of Québec. That was a brief excursion on a ferry across the St Lawrence in the middle of the afternoon during my walk around Québec.

It’s usually a bad sign for me to encounter a ferry and I’m never in a good humour, because every time I see a ferry, it always makes me cross.

Once that was out of the way I had a marathon wood-chopping session. I’ve used up a pile of wood over the last couple of weeks and so it needed to be replaced.

That took quite a while and created a nice pile of sawdust for the composting toilet.

It’s also made a nice little space in the lean-to and I’m hoping that I can crack on with that idea. I’d love to have enough space in there for my little workshop by the end of winter

Finally, I carried on with the floor in the shower room, and I’ve worked out why there’s a problem with the floor levels. It seems that with the wisdom that only Brico Depot can conjure up, the grooves are off-centre.

Now that wouldn’t particularly matter if the off-centre was consistent on each plank but in fact, while a pack might be consistent, the batch isn’t.

And that’s just plain ridiculous because there’s a planed side and a rough side, so you can’t even turn the planks over in order to even out the centres.

For tea this evening I tried a little experiment.

As well as starting off the baked potatoes in the oven, I chopped up a few sprouts and carrots, put them in a pyrex dish with some water and put them in the oven too.

Add a veggie burger and onions and garlic in a baking tray and use some of the veg water to make a gravy and I had a magnificent evening meal. Just like a king, in fact.

A wise move indeed, buying this little stove as I have said so many times before.

And setting up a little kitchen in a corner here, that’s working too.

-2

Tuesday 13th November 2012 – I’VE JUST WOKEN …

… up 🙁

Yes, I went out like a light again in the middle of the evening and it’s hardly as if I’ve been working too hard either.

This morning after coffee I wrote some more stuff for one of the Radio Anglais programmes that we do – a delightful couple of pages on composting toilets, would you believe?

And then I went out to cut another pile of wood ready for the bad weather.

After lunch I carried on emptying the first floor and finally, at 18:00, I was in a position where tomorrow, if nothing else crops up, I can rip up the floor in what will shortly be the shower room.

It’s quite nice tongue-and-grooving but it has about 200 years of ingrained dirt from when it was the upstairs hallway – that is, until I turned the stairs around in November 2009.

It’s impossible to clean it – believe me, I’ve tried, and so it’s coming up and being replaced with new. Once that’s in and given a couple of coats of varnish, I can start on insulating the walls and then fit the plasterboard.

Yes, and I don’t know why, but I also seem to have been very popular today.

I’ve had four phone calls, from Cécile, Rosemary, Percy Penguin and Liz, although not necessarily in that order. Maybe its those that are wearing me out.

-1

Friday 9th November 2012 – I DIDN’T QUITE …

… manage to do as much as I would have liked on the tidying up in the bedroom where I’m working.

I had a phone call from Cécile this morning inviting me round for a chat. She’s renovating a house all on her own and reading between the lines, she had run out of ideas and inspiration.

That, of course is something to which I can easily relate, having been here myself on many occasions and needing a push along the path (thanks, Terry).

Anyway, we had quite a long chat about things in her house and so she’s going out shopping tomorrow for some bits and pieces to help her along the way.

It really does help to have someone to chat to every now and again in circumstances like this.

This morning though, I had a good stint on the website and I’ve now finished my visit to Québec and I’m back in my motel in the Street of 100 Motels.

I can now start indexing the Québec photos and splitting the pages up into bite-sized morsels so as not to overwhelm the MTV generation with its truncated attention span.

That might take some time too.

After that, I cut a pile of firewood, emptied the composting toilet (there aren’t half some lovely jobs around here) and then attacked the tidying up for an hour or so.

The pile of stuff on the shelves is diminishing rapidly. I can’t imagine what half of the stuff is doing in here anyway. It should be in the barn.

Tonight I lit the fire, even though there wasn’t really a need. It’s just that I fancied jacket potatoes and baked beans for tea and for that I need the oven.

It was well-worth the effort too, really enjoyable.

And so I’ve decided to have an early night tonight. That will do me good too.

But before I go, a huge “well done” to Rhys who has at last, after all kinds of vicissitudes, some of which have been mentioned in these pages and others which haven’t, been finally awarded his citizenship of the USA.

Yes, I’m really happy for you and I’m sure that the rest of the readership is too.

You deserve it.

-1

Wednesday 31st October 2012 – I WAS IN BED …

… at some kind of ridiculous time last night – long before midnight in fact.

And I went out like a light and didn’t wake up until about 06:30. I wish that I could do that more often.

What with one thing and another (and once you start, you’ll be surprised just how many other things there are), I was detained up here until lunchtime and so it wasn’t until about 14:30 that I went out to play.

Another pile of wood was cut and then I made a start on … the garden, would you believe?

In the potato bed pulling out the weeds and about three potatoes. It’s been a miserable year for spuds.

I also pulled the courgette and about 10 chili peppers off the relevant plants. The frost has well-and-truly done for the plants but the fruits are still there? just about.

The courgette will be in next week’s curry and the chili peppers are currently drying out.

No fire tonight either although it’s rather close to the limit. There wasn’t anything to cook particularly.

And tomorrow is a Bank Holiday here. I usually have bank holidays off but I’ve yet to have one this year, so busy have I been, and so tomorrow my feet will be up all day.

And quite right too. I deserve it

-4

Tuesday 30th October 2012 – I LIT THE FIRE …

… tonight too.

Not for any particular reason (it wasn’t all that cold and I wasn’t planning on cooking anything) but it just seemed like a plan.

And it was a glorious day today too – not a cloud in the sky all day.

First job, now that I’m on winter hours, is to cut wood. Some out of the lean-to and some from off this big pile that I’ve been moving around from one place to another.

That took a while, especially as I was interrupted by a phone call from Percy Penguin, who doesn’t feature in these pages half as often as she deserves.

But now that I’m a little-better organised … &#34ahem;" – ed … I can spend the usual 15 minutes per day on the wood.

After that, one job I’ve not done for ages is to replace all of the batteries in the ancillary equipment. I put a pile of those on charge and then went round changing everything.

We now have tons of stuff working that wasn’t working before, even including the projector clock.

This afternoon saw me tidying up some stuff (yes, honestly!) and then working on the bank at the back of the hard-standing – pulling out the overhanging rocks.

As for all of the soil, I’ll shovel it into the back of Caliburn one of these days, and move it somewhere.

In the verandah later I made a mega pepper-and-lentil curry, which should keep me going for the next short while.

No more courgettes though – the frost has done for them.  

-4